Archive for December, 2010

Christmas is finally over and a new year is on its way. Before you turn off this is not a retrospective of the past year and a list of promises (which will be broken) for the new year. Instead a note that I’ll probably be relearning some long lost skills, namely basic electronics as Christmas saw a small but welcome present – a Netduino Plus. My only hope is that I’ll get up to speed quickly enough and don’t burn it out.

So it has been a week or so since Visual Studio 2010 was released in the wild and the verdict is that it is a great step forward. It is amazing how simple things like pinable data tips make your life as a developer a lot easier.

One thing I have found irritating is the fact that you need Sharepoint installed in order to use the reporting facilities in Team Foundation Server (TFS). This is not so much of a problem in a team environment as you are normally using servers to host TFS but it is a bind in a single developer environment. For those of you who are not aware, Sharepoint will not install on Vista or Windows 7 running on a 32 bit machine. This is a problem for me when experimenting as the environment where I test my ideas before implementing them is Windows 7 32-bit. Looks like I’ll be rebuilding an old 64-bit machine in the near future. On the up side, it will allow me to look at Sharepoint 2010 which has recently been added to MSDN. As I say, all developers like new toys :).

Update: 25/04/2010

A recent blog posing by Shai Raiten suggests that Sharepoint can be installed on Windows 7 32-bit. At the end of the post it suggested that an advanced installation was possible (note the Advanced button is highlighted) but this generated several errors. I have since read the full article on Bamboo Solutions web site and followed their instructions and I now have WSS3.0 SP1 installed on my laptop. Now all I have to do is get the reporting services working.

The Firestarter event held at the start of this month saw Microsoft announce the future release of Silverlight 5. A run down of some of the new features can be found here on John Papa’s blog. There is a also a link to the video of Scott Guthrie’s keynote.